“The Society for Psychological Anthropology Lifetime Achievement Award honors career-long contributions to psychological anthropology that have substantially influenced the field and its development.” (SPA) Dr. Shore Specializes in Symbolic and psychological anthropology, Ritual, and Oceania, Polynesia and the United States. Congratulations!

John Lindo’s publication in The American Journal of Human Genetics is featured in Emory News. Dr. Lindo specializes in both the molecular and computational aspects of Ancient DNA research. He presents his work on the Native American Tsimshian tribe and their population changes based on DNA research.

“I want to help Native American tribes to reclaim knowledge of their very ancient evolutionary histories — histories that have been largely wiped away because of colonialism,” says Emory geneticist John Lindo in the Emory News article.

Dr. Jenny Chio’s film “Peasant Family Happiness” was recognized with an honorable mention at Heritales: International Heritage Film Festival, which was held last weekend in Évora, Portugal. There will be a screening and a public talk on October 8th in Santa Fe, as part of the Museum of International Folk Art’s current exhibition “Quilts of Southwest China”. Additionally, Dr. Chio will be giving a closed seminar for museum docents to help expand their knowledge and familiarity with social and political conditions in ethnic minority regions of Southwest China.

Finding ancient human remains in Africa is rare and most of the work done in this field is recent. A lot has happened in the last few years however. Emory’s eScienceCommons detailed Dr. Thompson’s role in the research.

Dr. Jessica Thompson hopes to learn more about migration patterns from the DNA of bones discovered in Malawi. It shows that the hunter gatherers that lived there as recently as 2,000 years ago are not genetically related to today’s population. Scientists previously relied on tools left behind to create migrations patterns. DNA now gives answers to whether populations mixed or whether one was forced out. The oldest samples from Malawi are over 8,000 years old. Dr. Thompson had help from graduate student Kendra Sirak with dating and DNA extraction of the 8,100 year old skeleton.

The work that Dr. Thompson collaborated in was featured in the New York Times.

Dr. Jenny Chio’s film, 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness, is selected for the 2017 Heritales: International Heritage Film Festival in September 2017 in Évora, Portugal. Co-organized by UNESCO and the University of Évora, the festival’s theme this year is “sustainable communities,” and it is one of the few film festivals focused on exploring cultural heritage politics through documentary film.

Greetings from Jordan where Dr. Liv Nilsson Stutz (Senior Lecturer in Anthropology) and Dr. Aaron Stutz (Associate Professor in Anthropology at Oxford College) are excavating at the cave site Mughr el-Hamamah, where they located archaeological contexts from the early upper Palaeolithic in 2010. This year they return to the cave to finish the excavations. In addition to excavating lithics and animal remains, their work this season aims at recovering the remains of plants (in the form of charcoal, seeds, nuts, etc) which will help them reconstruct the paleoenvironment and to better understand how palaeolithic hunters and gatherers used resources in the landscape. To help them they are joined by archaeobotanist Dr. Chantel White of the University of Pennsylvania, and her undergraduate assistant Fabian Toro. They are also benefiting from the invaluable help of John Murray (incoming PhD student at Arizona State University), Emma Hanlon, Neharika Penmetcha, Hazel Sima, and José Amador (undergraduate students at Oxford College and Emory College).

Jennifer Mascaro (PhD, Emory Anthropology) published a study in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience based on work she did as a postdoctoral fellow with Professor James Rilling.

The study found differences in behavior fathers showed their children, depending on the child’s gender, from response time to commonly used terminology. The split between fathers of sons and fathers of daughters was also present during brain scans employed in the study. Faced with different pictures, fathers of daughters reacted strongly to pictures of their daughters with happy expressions, while fathers of sons’ strongest reactions were to pictures of their child showing a neutral expression. (eScienceCommons)